My family has come up on our first significant conflict since reuniting in Portland this year. It’s a conflict that can easily be traced to triggered reactions – fear buttons going off in individuals because of proposed changes to our collective relating. It’s an opportunity for me to live into my values and my most recent self work around triggers.

I’ve come to believe triggers are really important to address in family and community because they are the source of most conflict and avoidance. We lash out at each other when we’re triggered. And it’s the triggers we know people have that keep us from speaking the truth of what we feel – we consciously or unconsciously know it will “set them off.” If we learn how to sit with our triggers in curiosity, figure out what our needs are and how to get them met, rather than withdraw or act out from them in fear, we wouldn’t take each other to these hurtful places. If we could learn to hold each other in our triggered spaces and help each other get our needs met, our joy and connection will grow individually and collectively.

Triggers are buttons of fear built up over time from past experiences. They are not rational, which is why it’s so easy to go to the ugly, irrational places when they go off. We act out or withdraw because we are trying to run from the triggered feeling – fight or flight. What we need to do with triggers is sit with them in curiosity so that we can understand them and give ourselves what we need to heal them. We need to figure out what we’re really afraid of (some kind of pain), re-frame the past stories that feed that fear (how we were hurt like that before), and recognize our need can be met in the present – which all aids in disarming the trigger. It’s hard work and it hurts, but not as much as projecting our pain onto each other and having these harmful breakdowns again and again if we never address the triggers. Or the hurt of losing the relationship because we can no longer bear the pain caused by trigger reactions.

As passionate as I am about community building, I’m simultaneously struggling with huge fears because I have triggers around tribe rejecting me, publicly humiliating me, turning on me and/or letting me down. While our Imps tribe was wonderful in the ways that it was, it was also full of people hurting each other because not everyone was willing to be conscious of how their behavior impacted others or vulnerable with their difficult thoughts and feelings. We either set off each other’s triggers in terrible ways, or we became afraid of setting off each other’s triggers and avoided vulnerability. Our relationships mostly broke down because of it.

I don’t want to repeat those patterns, which is why I want to go deeper in community building this time, and I want to build from the deep trust that already exists in our circle. I desire to take the conscious, abiding, mostly healthy love that my partners and I have nurtured into the larger community relationship. I want everyone who comes to the circle to feel true belonging, to know that they will be seen, heard, held and loved *no matter what.* But I need to grow into it more slowly and carefully this time. I need to take care with whom I make myself vulnerable, because not everyone is careful and conscious with vulnerability. I also need to continue building thick skin – an ability to not take things personally so that other people’s behavior doesn’t trigger me.

Everyone has needs that are seeking to be met. Triggers go off because we’re afraid that’s not going to happen. I believe if we could come together in our families/communities and articulate our needs to each other with the intention of making it work, we could figure out how we can meet them all, at least most of them most of the time. I believe if we become conscious of our own triggers and can catch ourselves in the moment that the button goes off, we can prevent worlds of pain in our relationships and actually heal these places in ourselves.

What we’re attempting to create in my family and community is very special…and precarious because it’s taking every one of us some place we’ve never been before. As much as it can be joyful and fun, it can be awkward and uncomfortable. We’re committing to huge vulnerability. Resistance is inevitable. Growing pains are inevitable. However, I believe our love and commitment to the relationship is bigger than any obstacle we will face individually and collectively. I hope the others believe this, too.

I am home alone gathering extra holiday items to take over to Eros’s parents’ beautiful AirBnB apartment to decorate for Christmas. (The place has a giant kitchen in which Mama Jen is going to do her cooking magic with duck and calamari!)
In the process I am reflecting on how my experience of the holidays is changing. It’s been in transition for six years – since my mother died, my marriage ended, and my first child left home, all the in the same year.

Until my mother died Christmas was always spent with my family of origin – my mother, my adoptive father, my sister, my children, my stepfather for the 10 years he was with us, and later my ex-husband for the 8 years we were together. As an adult, it often felt obligatory rather than inspired by genuine connection. Sadly, we never reached the status of healthy family, as evidenced by the last Christmas we spent with my mother. And the fact that we haven’t had a Christmas together since the one after her death, when we buried her.

In the last years of her life my mother was a mess of pain and medications with terrible side effects. She took Ambien to sleep and was one of those people who did things while sleeping – cooking and eating, shopping at Walmart (can you believe we have sleeping people driving and no one’s doing anything about it?!), and taking too many pills because she wasn’t awake to realize she already took them. I’m pretty sure that’s how she overdosed. And I know that’s what ruined our last Christmas together.

I woke up in the middle of Christmas night to the sound of the Christmas tree crashing. I went out to the livingroom to find my mom in an agitated state. She was confused. She was trying to find something. She knocked the tree over and shattered several special ornaments in the process. She was technically asleep, yet she appeared conscious and was trying to find more pills to handle the side effects of other pills. I had to babysit her for the rest of the night, continuously talking her out of needing to find more pills, sometimes restraining her to keep her from wandering the house and waking my children. I didn’t want my children to see their Nana that way. I didn’t want it to be happening at all. It was heartwrenching. And maddening. I couldn’t believe that I was in the same position again, having already put my mom to bed after she got too high on street drugs when I was in middle school.

That experience and her death eight months later changed Christmas forever. The following Christmas was our only opportunity to get together as a family to bury her. My sister came to Humboldt and we drove down to San Diego with the kids, stopping in North Fork to spread some of her ashes on her father’s grave. We buried the rest of her remains with her mother on the day after Christmas. We knew she would have wanted to be with them both.

Christmas at my father’s was strained and weird and cheerless. It was our first year without a tree. My sister and I made a light night shopping trip on Christmas Eve to gather some things that would make it bearable. I found a little wooden Christmas tree with ornaments that sat on a table top (I still have that tree, but don’t put it out because of the memory associated with it). We bought fun gifts for the kids. We did what we could to invoke some holiday spirit. But ultimately it was a shallow veneer over a pit of grief.

I’ve only seen my sister and my father once since that Christmas, at my son’s college graduation. In the years since, contact between us has become almost nonexistent. It’s as if the challenges with my crazy addict mother were the twisted threads that bound us and once she was gone we no longer had any common ground to relate from.

This is when Christmases with my chosen family began. I recognize that I am tremendously blessed that the Imps – and the resulting partnership with Jen and Camille – came into my life the same year I lost most of my family of origin. I am grateful that Mama Jen always hosted an Orphan’s Christmas during the years we were leading the Imps because it meant me and my kids always had a place to go. Good food and friendship is really all that’s needed to make the holidays feel special. A couple Christmases in the middle were spent with a lover and his daughters in a more traditional family way. And I was always invited to at least one additional fun holiday gathering by others in the Imps tribe (I’ve attended a Spanksgiving and a Sexmas!).

The year before last was my first Christmas without my family and without an orphan Christmas to go to. I was home with Eros and six months pregnant, having just found out about the pregnancy and deciding on adoption the month before. My daughter went to NYC with her girlfriend to spend Christmas with my sister and son, with my blessing as I had no idea how hard it would be. The Mamas had already moved to Portland. It was lonely and full of grief for my mother, my family, my children, and my friends. (My daughter had a tough time being away from me, too, and we’ve vowed to never spend Christmas apart again if we can help it!)

Last year we weren’t able to be with the Mamas and Lake at Christmastime. We had a small Christmas with our little family, and visited with some friends. My need for community was mostly met by throwing the holiday party for my coworkers.

This year everything is different again. This year starts a new family tradition. We are in Portland. We are having an Italian Christmas with our new family – Lake, the Mamas, and Chris’s parents. I hope in future years, when we have the big beautiful house, that we will be able to expand the circle to include others from all four of our families of origin.

I hope this is just the beginning of a family holiday tradition in our lives. I hope that no matter what comes, my chosen family can keep the threads of love between us strong and vibrant so that we continue desiring to spend the holidays together, rather than feeling obligated to because of our connection through our son. I hope that every year they cannot be here, my other children will know how much I want them with me and miss them when they are not. And most of all, I hope that we continue growing in our emotional health so that we can deepen our loving connections as the years go by and deepen the sense of belonging each of us feel.

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